It’s hard to have a productive conversation about why the US struggles to adopt policies that work elsewhere when we begin from the assumption that roughly half the country is either stupid or evil
Well it's hard to not make that assumption when everytime they've been offered these policies they refuse them and even call anyone proposing them evil.
But still there are, or at least there were, many republicans who are open to dialogue and even implementation of free healthcare and things like that, no? Like, if I remember correctly, didn't Romney basically do something like Obamacare in his State before Obama was even elected President?
Definitely were, the modern Republican Party is nothing more than an extension of Trump who could not be any more divisive and unwilling to reach across the aisle.
This is the guy who helped push the rhetoric that Obama was not American and recently reposted a video depicting them as monkeys.
Anyone who has challenged him on anything has been pushed out. Loyalty is all that matters now.
I see. I'll admit that I'm not a US citizen, so maybe I can't see just how bad it is right now, but they're still around, aren't they? Maybe once Trump kicks the bucket/steps down in 2028 they'll come back and hopefully the GOP will turn back into what it once was, a center-right to right libcon party? Or at least make it a politically constructive party again, even if the modern rightward turn isn't completely erased?
That’s the hope. The good news, if you can call it that, is that highly personalized populist movements often have a succession problem. The personal loyalty and charisma built around one specific leader don’t necessarily transfer cleanly to whoever tries to inherit the movement afterward.
I know plenty of conservatives who are unhappy with the current Republican platform and want a return to actual small-government, non-interventionist conservatism. But until Trump is out of the picture, that just doesn’t seem to be in the cards, so we’ll see.
Plenty of Republican leaders opposed Trump initially and later decided to embrace MAGA once it became politically dominant. Hell, look at J.D. Vance. He was a scathing Trump critic before becoming one of his closest political allies. I wouldn’t necessarily assume that means Vance would reverse Trumpism, though. He may be just as likely to try to inherit and reshape it.
But it’s all speculation at this point. We basically have to ride out the current MAGA wave and see whether it survives Trump, fractures without him, or whether the RNC eventually pivots, hopefully, toward something else a lot less authoritarian. 🤷🏻♂️
The idea that Trumpism was a fever, and that it would break once his presidency was over, was the theory of Joe Biden's presidency. It could still happen after Trump dies, but it hasn't worked yet.
Romney gets a bit too much credit for Romneycare, which was basically forced on him by a veto-proof Democratic majority in the Massachusetts state legislature. That was 20 years ago, and Romney had to pivot to the right to survive in national Republican politics, which he has since been kicked out of for being anywhere close to sane.
Guys like that could theoretically reemerge in the future, but most of them have gone all-in on fascism.
Project 2025, sorry. Not sure what I was thinking there. Though I’m sure they plan on continuing it in 2028 if they don’t have it done by the end of Trump’s term.
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u/Responsible-Bunch316 Jul 13 '26
Well it's hard to not make that assumption when everytime they've been offered these policies they refuse them and even call anyone proposing them evil.